This is our fourth blog post in our blog and social media tutorial series. This week's tutorial is about Wikipedia.
Wikipedia.com has become one of the foremost outlets for user-generated information on the Web. Since its creation in 2001, Wikipedia has “grown rapidly into one of the largest reference Web sites, attracting at least 684 million visitors yearly by 2008. There are more than 75,000 active contributors working on more than 10,000,000 articles in more than 260 languages.”
If you search Google regularly, you will notice that Wikipedia articles generally rank very high in the search results. So publishing a page about yourself or your business on Wikipedia can be a great way to market yourself or your website. You can significantly increase exposure to yourself and your products.
However, be careful about how you approach writing articles on Wikipedia. Wikipedia strongly discourages writing autobiographies because it is difficult to remain neutral when you are writing about yourself. While it is strongly discouraged, you can still create an autobiographical page if you are strategic about it. Write about yourself or your business as objectively as possible and as if you are writing about it solely with the purpose of providing information. Better yet get someone else to write it for you! Read this article for helpful information: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Autobiography
Getting started
In order to edit within Wikipedia, you will need to create an account. The steps are easy and their interface walks you through this process. To get started, go to http://www.wikipedia.com and click on ‘Create Account’.
Get the introduction and learn more about Wikipedia here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Introduction
The basic editing cheat sheet is available at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Cheatsheet
More information about creating your first page:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Your_first_article
Take special care to search for your name or business in Wikipedia to make sure there is not already a page created about you. If there is a page about you already, you can simply add information or links to the existing page.
Inserting links to your downloadable products on your Wikipedia page:
Once you have created your page or found the page that someone else has already created for you, you can insert a text link to your products in the ‘External Link’ section of the Wikipedia page. Here are the steps for inserting the text link into your page:
- Go to www.iamplify.com and search for the product or products you would like to feature on your Wikipedia page
- Copy the URL of the product landing page
- Login to your Wikipedia account
- Go to your Wikipedia page
- Click on the ‘edit’ link for the ‘External Links’ section
- Go to the last external link (usually denoted by a *)
- Add a * on the next line and then [
- Then paste the URL and hit the space bar
- Add the text you would like to appear as the link. For example, Kathy Smith Downloads. After the text add another ]
- Each link should look similar to this:
* [http://www.iamplify.com/store/bio/Kathy-Smith/products/author_id/226 Kathy Smith Downloads]
- Scroll down on the edit page and click ‘Show Preview’
- If the preview is satisfactory, then click ‘Save Changes.’ This will prompt you to enter a confirmation cod
More Information
- About Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:About
- Making the Best Use of Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:About#Making_the_best_use_of_Wikipedia
